The first round of France's presidential election is getting plenty of attention in the U.S., and it's easy to see why: It challenges the proposition that a free society, knowing that it stands at the edge of an abyss, will not persuade itself that it has learned to fly.
Political scientists sometimes speak of the concept of the rational voter, which is the idea that each person will typically make an intelligent political choice given his interests and options. In France—where Sunday's electoral menu consisted of quasi-fascism, quasi-Marxism, soft socialism and the bouillabaisse ideology of a failed and desperate incumbent—the rational choice for voters was to stay home.
Instead, the French came out in huge numbers, 80%-plus, to show their enthusiasm for their preferred recipe for disaster. As expected, Socialist Party challenger François Hollande came out slightly ahead of President Nicolas Sarkozy—27.9% to 26.7%—and the two will now go head-to-head in the May 6 runoff.
So this is the "responsible" choice now before the French. On the one hand, there is a man-child president who will one day serve as a second object lesson in the perils of raising to high office hyperactive but diminutive men. On the other hand, there is his laid-back, congenial challenger, about whom the worst that can be said is that his ideas are crazy. Again, rational French voters should probably stay home. Again, they'll probably turn out in big numbers.
What is the matter with France?
AFP/Getty Images
Francois Hollande, Socialist Party candidate for president of France.
Like everything in life, national politics always look different from the inside looking out than the outside looking in, and France's real problems aren't necessarily what they seem to the rest of the world. The talk of the day is the strong third-place finish of National Front candidate Marine Le Pen, which suggests that fascism, in heels, is again becoming fashionable in Europe.
But every Western democracy has a sizeable (if often submerged) constituency that supports some combination of xenophobia and economic nationalism, and Ms. Le Pen did only slightly better than her father's second-place, first-round, finish in 2002. France is not slouching toward 1933.
Nor is it hard to fault the French for wanting to throw Mr. Sarkozy out. Incumbents everywhere in Europe are getting the voters' boot, and the president's performance has been particularly disappointing given the pledges he made five years ago to break radically with the stagnation-inducing policies of the previous decades. Mr. Sarkozy, like Barack Obama, committed the original political sin of overpromising and underdelivering.
Still, the mystery of France is how a nation can witness what happens to countries that live beyond their means and yet insist on living beyond its means. France's debt-to-GDP ratio will rise to 90% this year from 59% a decade ago. It spends more of its GDP on welfare payments (28.4%) than any other state in the developed world. It has an employment rate of 62.8%, as compared to Germany's 76.5% or Switzerland's 82.9%.
These sorts of statistics may have been obscure before the economic crisis, when politics could still be the art of not making choices. Today you would need earplugs, a helmet and a burqa for the message not to get through. Nations, like people, cannot spend too much more than they make; otherwise they can lose their creditworthiness and go broke. Competition in a global economy is a reality, not an option. Wealth cannot be transferred if transfers also destroy wealth. Rich people can always take their money (and their tax payments) elsewhere. The "trade-off" between work and leisure is ultimately a choice between wealth and poverty.
Now the French have stared all this in the face and said: Ça n'a rien à voire avec nous. It has nothing to do with us.
No candidate in the contest has suggested the country ought to attract foreign investment or nurture its native entrepreneurs. No candidate seems to think a tax cut—whether on consumers, producers or wage-earners—might be a good idea. Is France capable of nurturing a Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg? The idea seems to have crossed none of the candidates' minds.
And how will France get out of its debts? Not through a more productive private sector and a more frugal public one, but in a flood of ever-cheaper currency, courtesy of a pliant ECB. That's something on which both Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Hollande firmly agree. Inflation is the windy updraft the falling man often mistakes as a force more powerful than gravity.
The U.S. differs from France in having a much more robust distrust of the state's power and its claims to wisdom, and an equally powerful faith in the regenerative powers of the free market. Federalism also creates opportunities for policy experiment—on school choice, for instance, or lower taxes—not always available to the French.
Yet Americans should also take note that we aren't so different from France, either: in our debt-to-GDP ratio, our employment rate, our credit rating. Above all, both in France and in America there's a belief that, as exceptional nations, we are impervious to the forces that make other nations fall. It's the conceit that, sooner or later, brings every great nation crashing to earth.
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